The general notion is that for any person to advance successfully in a corporate ladder, they have to be demanding, ruthless, make hard choices and sacrifice, usually at the expense of others; all the while, making ethical decisions and following the regulations of the firm. Likewise, for a corporation to be successful, it needs to be supported by the people who exhibit that type of belligerent yet ethically sound behaviour.

People make up a corporation and they run it, so in that sense, distinguishing a corporation as its own being is a front, a blatant excuse to separate a selected few human responsibility and for the corporation’s other employees and stakeholders to take the ultimate downfall.

A panel of selective human conscience make up the corporate conscience. There should be no distinction between the human and the corporate conscience; thus the panel of Board of Directors should be held accountable for their decisions and actions that conflict with the betterment of society. Instead, the government, for the most part, promotes the distinction, so that the selected few individuals benefit more from a collective shareholders' investment in the form of bigger bonus payout, luxurious lifestyle, expensive flights for meetings instead of an increasing value of the stock and larger payout of dividends over a specified period of time etc. In the end, more of the corporate earnings end up being in a selected few individuals’ pockets rather than trickled into the economy.

Few societal members and some governments believe that in enriching our corporations, some of those earnings can seep into the betterment of the society, so they tolerate. They let the “conscientious” few of the elite make charitable contributions to the society while offering them generous tax shelters so that more shareholders believe in the goodness of the corporate conscience, and they are then more willing to invest in them. They make a few exceptions for big corporations in the hopes that they can produce more work for the economy. Then, you have regulatory organizations who monitor and hold the firm and its members accountable for any broken rules, or any ethically wrong decisions and actions.

In this struggle of the corporate vs. society, jobs are lost, purchasing power is decreased over time, resources become increasingly exhausted, eventually depleted over time, and the quality of living is diminished even more so. So people become angry, they fight back, they retaliate with war, with crime, with protests and those voices are only getting louder. 

While the Occupy protests around many major cities of the world have the freedom to express their views, even so far as to inconvenient residences and societal resources, how productive will it be. The means values will have certainly be justified but in retrospect, will the end values be justified? Maybe but then maybe not either, although at the very least, it will have reawakened the conscience of the government, of the corporation, of the Board of Directors who run the direction of the company. The Occupy movements will have served, at the very least, as reminders for a collective conscientious efforts in the improving of our society and the betterment of people's basic quality of life. That is the ideal anyway. 

I understand why doctors swear to practice medicine ethically, much like the marriage vows. I admire their persistence in wanting to heal people. I admire the thought, if not a little too idealistic.

The admiration of the thought behind Hippocratic Oath comes mainly from the assumption that people are not good nor bad, make neither good choices nor bad and so, quite simply, human lives that should be saved with no exceptions whatsoever.

Obviously, there is value-added to society when a good person is saved. In contrast, should the person still be saved when the soul beyond the body is a man who has committed horrific crimes? There’s a question here of communal ethics vs. an individual’s ethics. Or perhaps there’s a question here of the doctor whose sole job is to fix the person’s body and the soul should not be factored in because the doctor is not and should not judge the morals of the patient?

With the clash of communal ethics and the individual’s set of values, I’m not sure which I would pick. I think most of us would like to say that we would save the bad man, going above our own value system and identifying or be associated with the ethics that a society perceives to be acceptable, or socially acceptable or even fashionably acceptable. Should a set of communal ethics trump individual ethics then when it comes to practicing medicine?

Then again, are we perhaps putting the doctors on a pedestal, expecting them to be superhumans? Or God-like? Judgement on whether a person is good or bad and then holding out surgery or medicine on them should not be up to us. So practicing medicine should be regarded as a service that doctors perform, much like paying a masseuse for a massage. The rest is not up to us to judge.

That being said, a doctor can still refuse medicine or surgery on someone they deem to be morally bad, much like we refuse to be friends with some people because we perceive them to be bad for us.

Bottom line, respect the wishes of the doctor and the patient. Nothing is black and white, just the way we interpret those lines.

When you invite the world to a city that has little history of violent protests, well then, the events of this past weekend happens. Toronto was hosting the world and when you have so many differences in opinion come together under one umbrella, there’s a lot of unity but there’s a lot of disunity as well. It leaves itself vulnerable.

I don’t think Torontonians should think something like this doesn’t happen in our Toronto the Good. That is not to say that Toronto should expected the bad, but rather, it should have been open to the idea that violence of this sort could happen.

I don’t condemn the police forces, nor the protestors fully because I don’t believe placing a complete blame on either one side will be the answer. There are just many reasons that attribute to this sort of violence. Furthermore, the violence of this past weekend in Toronto does not even come close to the Summits of the past in other cities, where the scale of violence has actually gotten people seriously injured.

[On whether Canada should have hosted G20 live or via live camera feed]

I don’t think using technology to bring the world leaders together on a computer screen to communicate on worldly issues is a fair alternative to hosting it live. I mean when any one of us host an event, we do it proudly and respectably. There’s a matter of pride and good manners despite the cost saving alternative of the latter.

[On that $1 billion security expense, well spent or not]

I’ll admit it was a little discouraging to see so many cops during the week, 58 cops to be exact on my 10 minute walk from Union Station to work, and few civilians walking the streets of Toronto. The number of cops had heavily outweighed the number of civilians by Thursday and Friday. Toronto had become a ghost town then.

On a positive scale, it was rather nice to see a little suburban attitude in the heart of the usually crowded city. It was quieter than normal, I didn’t infringe on anyone’s personal space to get through, and I didn’t feel the need to be on guard. There wasn’t a lot of intimidation as some of the cops had greeted me with a good morning and a smile. I was never once asked to show my ID though I understand why people were frustrated when asked to do so. What is a little inconvenience to safety?

The way I see it, if the violence in the Toronto streets had escalated even more than it already had, most Torontonians would question why Canada had not spend more on security.

Sure, the value of what and how money is spent can be a subjective question here but wouldn’t Toronto want to be over-prepared than under-prepared when it comes to the livelihood of Torontonians and businesses?

The approximate spending of $1 billion had been justified after the violent breakouts for some Torontonians but there were still others who felt the police should have contained the violence even more. How does violence get contained fully?

[On protestors]

I don’t believe in protests as I don’t believe it will achieve much, much less violent protests. I don’t believe in the Black Bloc’s tactic of shattering businesses, burning police cars and invading the spaces of our civilians’ livelihood in order to achieve a message. Quite honestly, I don’t even know what the anarchists’ message was other than to destroy any representation of capitalism. If anything, it was capitalism that lent its hand to their flights from other cities and supported their activities and/or causes.

For the peaceful protestors, sure, you’re all quite annoying and loud but I can only commend to you for doing anything rather than nothing in getting your voices heard; whether they were for a just cause or not is a very subjective question based on different measures of values. I commend to you for not fearing fear. I commend to you for your courage in facing the unexpected. It is quite unfortunate that some of you were mistaken for using Black Bloc tactics but it’s to be expected that the police forces would be on the defensive after the protests escalated to violence. And you had just been caught in the middle of it all.

[On the aftermath, justified arrests or unjustified….]

I’m sure some of the arrests were unjustified but in all that chaos, arrests of this measure is bound to happen! The police force will push its “rights” to obtain control, within legal or illegal means. Besides, the Canadian attitude towards any unjust treatment would be to sue the other whom they think has pushed the boundaries of the law.